Weekend

Wild flowers surround the house but she can't sit still in the yard. The goldenrod and cone flower shower her eyes with charm while her toes rub anxiously against one another and her cell phone sits warm and smooth in her hand. She lays back in the grass and blinds herself with the golden sun for a split second before closing her eyes. The phone doesn't ring. She sits up. Then she jumps up, does a weird little dance that is jerky, not graceful, with her face scrunched in a crazed expression, just for a minute, since no one can possibly be watching. She looks at the driveway, how it plunges downhill and then curves off to the west and disappears. The walnut trees that punctuate the prairie hillside beyond the yard stand still, achingly still, while mosquitoes and bumble bees dance. She closes her eyes in the yogic mountain pose, standing with perfect posture, shoulders back head reaching gently toward the sky and she gets ahold of her breath for a few moments as she grounds down into the softness of the yard. Inhale. Exhale. And then, because no one could possibly be watching, she throws her right leg out and kicks maniacally with her head bucking back and forth. The cell phone in her hand is smooth and silent.

She hears the rumble of wheels on gravel a ways off and she runs into the house to throw a dress over her head. She pulls the loose thing over her body and steps back outside to call the names of the cats in the sing-song way that makes them come. Together they dive out of the brush to the east and race toward her in the doorway. She gets the treats from above the refrigerator, feeds them to the cats and shuts the door just as the blue truck rounds the bend in the driveway and climbs up the hill. She stands at the kitchen sink watching the truck bypass the yard and drive up the hill beyond the house. Hunters. They park in the prairie and emerge from the truck, caked in orange gear. “Sorry,” she says to the cats who are still winking with pleasure as the treats slide down into their bellies, “no more playing outside today, your colleagues are here.” The cats take seats on the living room floor and commence to bathe.

She does a few dishes and turns on the radio. The house is some kind of cell service dead zone so the phone is unlikely to ring now. She opens the door, leans out and brings the pee and poo bucket inside. She takes it to the bathroom, undoes the cover, bends down to the litter box and scoops urine soaked balls of clay into the bucket, pressing the cover back on the bucket before opening the door and putting it back on the porch. She looks out the window in the living room. The hunters' truck sits on its perch and she imagines the men in the woods, holding their rifles close to their bodies as they hike gently, so as to be quiet, through the brush. She sits down on the floor and pets both cats at the same time. One stretches, reaching his front paws as far away from his back paws as possible, his body shaking a bit with the effort, then purring and rubbing his head into the carpet as he relaxes into a U shape. The other gets up and curls into a tight ball on the sofa.

Out the window, the truck is perched and the tall grass of the prairie on the hillside is almost yellow in the bright sun. She watches the goldenrod and the cone flower sway gently. She spots a small dark mound in the yard and looks down, disgusted, at the resting cat who she knows beheaded the mouse or mole that sits gruesomely dead in the grass before her. She was planning on mowing the yard later and she is glad to have noticed this newest corpse before hand. She goes to the bedroom and gathers the dirty clothes in her arms. She shifts the weight of the armload in order to pick up the phone and nestle it into one hand. She manages to open the door and walk over to the shed where she drops the clothes on the concrete floor and turns the water on in the sink that sits next to the old, half-broken washing machine. She wiggles the foil turkey tray into position, folded up like a trough with one end tucked under the sink faucet, sloped downward to carry water into the body of the washing machine. She turns on the hot water, adds detergent and borax and then the clothes. She hears a gun shot and imagines a wild turkey keeling over. The phone rings. Another shot. She silences the ringing phone, pokes her head outside the shed and focuses on a cloud of gnats.

My Unwritten Memoir/Self- Portrait/Manifesto

Time rolls steadily along, but the moments of my life don't seem to disappear with the seconds. They jot themselves down, notes waiting to be weaved into a story.

* The first major harvest on our organic flower farm; Arthur and I grinning in the dim glow of sunrise, quickly snipping stems while behind us the dry brown mountain banks stood firm along the cool, deep Lake Chelan.

* The Tibetan girl picking pockets at a crowded Shanghai intersection, handing the loot over to a gang of Chinese men in an alley, while I ran from reactionless bystander to reactionless bystander looking for help.

* The nurse who met my sister and I in the lobby of the nursing home that cold, eighth night of Chanuka in 1995, "I'm sorry, your mother expired two hours ago."

As I live them and then move on, moments fade into dusty filing cabinets of my memory, or perhaps onto a giant hard drive deep under the earth's surface, waiting for me to compile them into a publishable document.

A few days ago, I was in an old barn in the mountains that had been converted into a used book store. For a split second, I thought I saw a copy of my text on the shelf. My book, as yet unwritten, is so real to me.

What drives this urge to record the life I am living? Is it Art? Is it Ego? Is it Activism?

I wonder if the faithful feel less driven to lay their lives down on paper. If I believed, as some do, that an all knowing god perched up on high was doling out destiny, would I need to record the doings of my days for other humans to read?

My memoir/self-portrait/manifesto is not yet compiled much less ready for print. I have such a busy schedule of being alive, creating recordable moments, but there are other factors too that keep me from writing the text. Perhaps it is a lack of genius on my part, a lack of patience, a lack of motivation, a lack of audience, a lack of quiet personal space. But more than anything I know that writing my life down would narrow its meaning. Writing it would distill it, flatten it, tell one angle when truly the angles are infinite. It might be worth it though.. for Art, for Ego, for Activism.

Of course, the possibility remains that the thing is already written; that my steps, my thoughts, my quotations and my dreams are ink filled. Perhaps the plot is already compiled and edited, resting on a shelf in some used book barn I haven't yet happened into.